You are more than likely bright enough to realize the students were making a political statement with those t-shirts. They even freely admit it.

So what? Are other students allowed, at other times, to make political statements? If the answer is "no", then sure, not allowing flag t-shirts is fine. However, if other students are allowed to make political statements, then you can't tell them they can't make political speech. A "hostile learning environment" is irrelevant: any political speech of any kind is going to offend someone, so if you're allowing some political speech but not others, then you're discriminating and playing favorites. It's not the school's job to select which political opinions are OK and which aren't.

the American flag was little different than a slogan saying "deport anchor babies."

So are you suggesting that t-shirts bearing that slogan should be censored by the government? I find that offensive. This is a matter of free speech, nothing more. Teenagers should enjoy the same free-speech protections that the rest of us enjoy, even if it offends some people. I saw plenty of teenagers in my high school wearing religious t-shirts; those, to me, are offensive (and even moreso today considering how extremist American Christianity has become). Why should they be allowed to wear those, but not anti-immigration t-shirts?

If a school wants to avoid this stuff, maybe they should just have a blanket policy, in effect on *all* school days, that explicitly describes the allowed dress code. Then they could just forbid all clothing with slogans or flags of any kind.

Finally, I have to disagree that a US flag is somehow like making a political statement about immigration. It's the flag of this nation; if wearing it is offensive to someone, regardless of the day, that seems rather ridiculous.

Exactly. If you try to avoid offending people, you're merely stifling expression and creativity, and in effect oppressing people. The problem is that people on both sides want to do this, though they want to oppress different people: on the right, they want to censor anything that offends Christians; on the left, they want to censor anything that offends minorities, even when the minorities have even worse views than the Christians they dislike so much.

Personally, I like the values that France has as a society, with one of them being secularism. Why this word wasn't written into our Constitution, I don't know, but it should have been. As soon as you start pandering to religions and religious values, you get all kinds of horrible anti-human-rights side effects, since most religions are all about oppressing people and denying them their human rights if they don't kowtow to the religion.

They're not eager to push diversity. They're eager to find a selling point which can be leveraged to expand their own level of power and/or wealth.

That would explain the motivation of the politicians and others at the top. However, it doesn't explain all the lower-middle-class 20-something liberals who buy into all this stuff. My guess is that they're just parroting what their "leaders" have fed them, just like people on the right parrot everything that their leaders (like Pat Robertson, Rand Paul, etc.) feed them.

I agree with the AC who responded here. I will point out, however, that the BSDs were around before Linux, yet Linux (kernel) is the one which now powers most of the world's smartphones, countless embedded devices, and countless servers (including most webservers), plus a fair number of desktop computers. By contrast, I've never actually seen FreeBSD in use anywhere personally. I know Hotmail used to run on it more than a decade ago, and that's all I can think of; I sure don't see it in any embedded systems like I do with Linux. The permissive license didn't help its adoption, it seems.

However, on the flip side, the technically best and probably 2nd most popular FOSS database, PostgreSQL, has a permissive license (BSD I'm pretty sure), and it's doing great, and in fact it seems that a slow but steady stream of people are abandoning MySQL for it.

Wearing a flag is not discriminatory. Wearing a flag is speech, and should be protected under the First Amendment. Not allowing someone to wear a flag (any flag) is a violation of the First Amendment. It's quite simple.

See my response to the AC who responded to you.

Thank you, AC. It amazes me how if you criticize one "side" in this country, unthinking morons will assume you must obviously be on the other "side". sjbe's response shows this perfectly.

No, American left-wingers would obviously not support these "religious freedom" laws, because they're obviously aimed at letting Christians discriminate against people they don't like (mainly homosexuals).

However, these same left-wingers are certainly *not* the ones who want to keep kids from wearing American flags to school because they'd "offend" Hispanics. I don't think I need to prove that it's the leftists who are behind this one. Right-wingers are up in arms about stuff like this (though not necessarily for the right reason, which is freedom of speech).

Honestly, I really think that if someone tried to push a law that banned "insulting Islam" in the US, a good number of left-wingers would support this, because they're so big on "celebrating diversity" that they compromise true liberal values (equal rights, secularism, etc.) just so they can cozy up with "oppressed" minorities like Hispanics and Muslims.

There's nothing stopping the copyright holders of a GPL'd project from taking it proprietary. It's not much different than if the people running a permissive licensed project (BSD/MIT) decided to take it proprietary. Everything up to that point will still be available barring any patent issues.

Two points:

1) As you said, this doesn't remove the actual project from accessibility in the FOSS-sphere. You just can't have any new versions that the copyright owners decide to publish under a proprietary license. You can still use the existing code all you want, and you can fork it too if you want.

2) This isn't really a big fear among people. Honestly, how many times has this happened? The advantage of GPL over BSD licenses is that with GPL, only the actual copyright holder can do such a thing. With BSD, anyone can do this, so you have cases like Kerberos, where a giant company with lots of resources grabs some FOSS code, "extends" it with proprietary extensions, and then pushes the new version so it's effectively been hijacked. This can't happen with GPL; there, the big corp would have to buy the copyrights from the original holders (which may be very difficult if there's a lot of contributors; with Linux (kernel), for instance, it's probably impossible to get all the contributors to agree to selling or even to a license change to GPLv3), before they could pull such a move.

Unfortunately, it's not just the right that wants to silence "offensive" speech; the left wants to as well: the SCOTUS refused to hear a case about high school students who wore t-shirts with the American flag to school on Cinco de Mayo and got in trouble because the school said this could "incite violence" among Hispanic students who apparently are offended by the US flag. This case was even supported by the students who had worn black armbands back in the 60s to protest the Vietnam war, and won the SCOTUS case, the decision of which said that free speech rights do not end at the schoolhouse door (these former students supported the flag-wearing teenagers' right to free speech).

It's weird how some on the left are so eager to push "diversity" that they'll compromise our own liberal western values in the process of pandering to people who do not share these values. These values are under assault from both sides: the wacky Christian religionists on the right, and the leftists who denounce right-wing Christians (for good reason) and then back up people with the same or worse values just because they're non-Western.

Um, Jeb AFAIK has never held a Congressional seat at the Federal level, so it's not like he had a chance to vote on it. That doesn't mean he wouldn't have voted for it.

But yeah, Hillary is basically a Republican with a "(D)" next to her name, except maybe for the HillaryCare thing she tried.

He's probably unelectable thanks to some stupid moves he's made -- he voted against the Violence Against Women Act.

Walker is still in his first term and he dropped out of college, which is a big negative (in my view). He was only one semester short of a degree, but he's never bothered to finish? Something's not quite right there.

Christy is a corrupt New Jersey politician.

What makes you think these people are unelectable based on these factors? I think you're vastly overestimating the competence of Republican voters.

My prediction is that we're going to have a Republican president elected in 2016, and it'll be Jeb Bush. He's going to run against Hillary Clinton. After Obama disillusioning the progressives and blacks, turnout on the Democrat side is going to be weak because no one except middle-aged and up white women are excited about Clinton. Bush is going to win the Republican nomination somehow. Bush speaks fluent Spanish and is married to a Mexican-American woman. Republican voters are going to vote for him just because he's Republican, and the Latinos are all going to vote for him too because of the above factors, and because he'll appeal to their religious sensibilities with his anti-abortion rhetoric, plus his positive views on immigration reform.

I don't think he's calling all banks everywhere evil, he's really talking about the big banks. They are evil: they wrecked the economy, then got paid for it with taxpayer dollars.

There are other banks that aren't so bad, but they're usually much smaller, confined to one state or local area usually. Credit unions are also usually pretty good.

But banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and worst of all HSBC are evil through-and-through.

As for regulation, that'd be nice, wouldn't it? Too bad we can't have that.

That does not make banks "criminal organizations," equivalent to drug mafias.

Complete bullshit; this is a lie.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

HSBC has been laundering money for drug cartels for quite a while now, and nothing's been done about it, and no one is prosecuting them. Money laundering IS a crime, so this by definition makes this bank a criminal organization.

You are a liar.